Lucas Blogs About Books

A blauggre ther was . . . The Intro I like to take on reading projects every now and then. Back before I had this blog I read one chapter of   Journey to the West daily for a hundred days. On the one hand, this made the episodic nature of the narrative feel a little repetitive. On the other hand it was an easy way to read a classic of world literature. I just wrapped up another reading project for this blog—  A Year of Unfortunate Events  — wherein I read one entry in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events every month for thirteen months. Oddly enough this did leave me feeling a little burnt out. I'm not particularly satisfied with the way the feature turned out. I guess those books and I weren't quite as simpatico as I remembered and the whole thing started to seem like a self-imposed chore. I guess what I'm saying is that this next project can go one of two ways. The Project I first encountered The Canterbury Tales  in college, and t...

So . . . I may have been distracted from my blog writing lately. Lucas, are you deploying the inOpportune cOntent rePlacement proceSs because you spent the last week building Lego instead of working on your blog? Yes. I've been playing with Legos inst— Lego. I beg your pardon? The plural of Lego is Lego. Whatever. Look, my for realsies job is considered essential, and last week was a little stressful, so I picked up some Lego for fun. For example, check out this 4x4: Fig. 1 Yep, that's a photographer dressed as a tree. Well, that is pretty cool. and is that an ice cream truck? Yep! Fig. 2 It has a sliding window! And is that — is that a Monster Burger Truck? It is a Monster Burger Truck. Fig. 3 You can stow the stair case inside the truck! But I feel like you're ignoring the elephant on the table. The big pirate fort? Fig. 4 The big pirate fort! Yeah, that's called the Pirates of Barracuda Bay, it's pretty nea...

I know that things aren't so happy right now. I wish I could say that things will be better soon, but I honestly don't know. In any case, yesterday was Easter. My mom made us pancakes and bacon for breakfast and I roasted a chicken with potatoes and onions for lunch while we maintained social distance from the family friends we usually spend Easter with. Fig. 1: Pancake breakfast. Fig. 2: Chicken dinner. I hope anyone reading this is doing well. For real blog post next Monday. Links: Hey, remember when YouTube was really pushing Mariya Takeuchi's " Plastic Love "? Even if you don't, it slaps. But if you like to put outdated memes in your outdated memes, you may enjoy this mash-up of "Plastic Love" and Smash Mouth's " All Star ": " Plastic Love but it's All Star by Smash Mouth " PS - I'd totally forgotten that the "All Star" video was a Mystery Men  tie-in. Remember Mystery Men ? I remember ...

Wow, they're right, day-for-night shooting is really obvious. So, what's this book's deal? Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse  is a pulpy detective novel (originally serialized) about his Continental Op character (who you may recognize from Red Harvest , the inspiration for Kurosawa's Yōjimbō , which Leone remade as A Fistful of Dollars ). The Op is a short, stout, middle-aged man who works, unsurprisingly, at the Continental Detective Agency. He's been hired by an insurance company to investigate a robbery at the home of a Mr. Leggett, a chemist whose work on removing impurities from glass has drawn the attention of a local jeweler who wants to see if the process might remove flaws from gemstones. And it just gets more convoluted from there. No surprise in a detective story really. There are actually three separate cases in this novel but as time goes on we get drawn into an elaborate plot involving jailbreaks, assumed identities, hallucinations, a cult, ...